18 Facts About Dennis Ritchie

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist.

Dennis Ritchie is most well known for creating the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system and B programming language.

Dennis Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.

Dennis Ritchie's father was Alistair E Ritchie, a longtime Bell Labs scientist and co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits on switching circuit theory.

Dennis Ritchie graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics.

In 1967, Ritchie began working at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center, and in 1968, he defended his PhD thesis on "Computational Complexity and Program Structure" at Harvard under the supervision of Patrick C Fischer.

Dennis Ritchie relates that, after discussions with the National Security Agency, the authors decided not to publish it, as they were told that the principle was applicable to machines still in use by foreign governments.

Dennis Ritchie was involved with the development of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, and the programming language Limbo.

Dennis Ritchie worked together with Ken Thompson, who is credited with writing the original version of Unix; one of Dennis Ritchie's most important contributions to Unix was its porting to different machines and platforms.

Dennis Ritchie liked to emphasize that he was just one member of a group.

Dennis Ritchie suggested that many of the improvements he introduced simply "looked like a good thing to do", and that anyone else in the same place at the same time might have done the same thing.

Dennis Ritchie's Turing Award lecture was titled "Reflections on Software Research".

Dennis Ritchie was found dead on October 12,2011, at the age of 70 at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, where he lived alone.

Dennis Ritchie had been in frail health for several years following treatment for prostate cancer and heart disease.

News of Dennis Ritchie's death was largely overshadowed by the media coverage of the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, which occurred the week before.

Dennis Ritchie's name was not a household name at all, but.

Dennis Ritchie engaged in conversation in a chalet in the mountains surrounding Salt Lake City at the 1984 Usenix conference.

Dennis Ritchie has been the author or contributor to about 50 academic papers, books and textbooks and which have had over 15,000 citations.